Another Visual Voicemail Service

by Jake on January 15, 2008

After my general disappointment in testing out the Callwave visual voicemail solution, I’m trying out SimulScribe instead. The concept is the same – SimulScribe accepts my voicemail messages, stores them and sends me an email with the contents of the message. So far, I haven’t gotten any voicemails so I’m not sure how well it works just yet, but the demo seemed impressive when I saw it at the CES Digital Experience event. I’m not entirely convinced this kind of service is worth spending money on, but I’ll try it out and see if I can’t live without it.

  • http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmpha2VsdWRpbmd0b24uY29tL2Fza19qYWtlLzIwMDYxMDAyX2F1dG9tYXRpY2FsbHlfc3RhcnRfeW91dHViZV9 Audio and Video Answers – Jake Ludington – MediaBlab

    during CES 2008. I also mentioned being disappointed with the quality of the speech to text conversion. Callwave’s service was free and in that case, I got exactly what I paid for. On January 15, I startedtesting SimulScribe. SimulScribe is free for 30 days and then will likely cost me $9.95 per month at the rate I get messages on my cell phone. The voicemail to text conversion done by SimulScribe isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty awesome.

  • http://jake.iowageek.com cPanel®

    Congratulations to Scoble and Fast Company Decentralized Twitter is Weblogs.com on SteroidsAnother Visual Voicemail ServiceApple Follows CES with More Lackluster Updates Pink is the new Palm (Centro) CES Survival Guide – 7 Tips For a Successful Consumer Electronic Show Meet me at the CES Bloggers Party furnaceclaims.com Carrier Furnace Class Action

  • http://www.TechHerding.com Dick Carlson

    I’ve been using it and absolutely love it. I had reservations about how well it could transcribe voice, but I’ve had a couple of pretty difficult calls — including my 87-year-old mother and a guy from Yugoslavia — and it did great.

    It’s so nice to just see those long, rambly messages as text so I can click next. Goodbye, Mortgage Broker. So long, Software Salesman. Hast La Vista, pesky contractor guy.

    It’s great.

  • http://www.jakeludington.com/web_services/20080213_simulscribe_voicemail_to_text_conversion.html SimulScribe – Voicemail to Text Conversion

    [...] service was free and in that case, I got exactly what I paid for. On January 15, I started testing SimulScribe. SimulScribe is free for 30 days and then will likely cost me $9.95 per month at the rate I get [...]

  • Leslie

    Well as usual you techies just dont get it. If the play toy isnt your gig you give it a dig. How bout the 40 plus million deaf people in the US?? Maybe just maybe it would be a great service to enalbe us to actually recieve and understand our voice mails?? Never thought of it did you? Course not you are only interested in your own technobabble. What a nobody. To you and millions of others we dont exist. Well we have a lot of cell phones and text msging is good and being able for people even clients maybe to leave messages we can decipher is a good good thing. So cut em some slack doesent have to be perfect has to be usable.

    whew your take reallly pissed me off. hope you find a way to consider all angles in future blogs

  • Leslie

    oh and another thing i forgot totally in 8months only five replies including mine at least it is comforting that no one is listening to you!!

  • http://www.jakeludington.com Jake

    @Leslie: Hopefully you read my review of the Callwave service before making your angry posting here. If you did, I would hope you could agree that it is important for that type of service to get things right to the point where you would at least know:

    1) who called
    2) how to contact them again

    At the time I reviewed the service (in January 2008) it failed to provide this level of functionality consistently. This post was a follow up to that review suggesting that I was trying SimulScribe to see if they performed better. I did write a further follow-up review of SimulScribe where I indicated I planned to pay for the service when the trial period ended. I am still using the service, although it’s now called PhoneTag, not SimulScribe.

    As to your point about my not taking deaf people into consideration, I wouldn’t be so insulting as to pretend I know what it’s like to be deaf. I write about what I know. I don’t know what it’s like to be deaf. My friend Meryl is both deaf and a geek. She has thoughts on visual voicemail as well. They don’t sound drastically different from mine.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: